In a bid to diversify away from traditional European customers, Russia’s oil and gas giant Gazprom has signed a deal with an Israeli firm on a liquefied natural gas (LNG) project.

A subsidiary of Russian energy giant Gazprom has signed a 20-year deal with Levant LNG Marketing Corp. to exclusively purchase LNG from Israel’s Tamar offshore gas field in the Mediterranean, Gazprom said on Tuesday.

The agreement will expand Gazprom’s LNG exports and trading portfolio and follows a letter of intent signed by Gazprom in March 2012.

“This is an important milestone for strengthening Gazprom’s position in the global LNG market,” Vitaly Vasilievm, Gazprom’s marketing & trading CEO said.

“We are confident that this deal will not only help strengthen and diversify Gazprom’s LNG portfolio, but also help GM&T build on our success in the Asia-Pacific region, where we have recently closed long and medium-term deals with numerous counterparties in India and North East Asia.”

The Tamar floating LNG project will produce gas from the Tamar and Dalit gas fields off Israel’s east Mediterranean coast.

In November 2011 the Tamar partners signed an agreement with DSME, NextDecade and D&H Solutions to initiate the joint development and implementation of a floating LNG facility scheduled for commissioning in 2017 with an estimated annual output of 3 million tons per year.

Shortly after, the midstream project company Levant LNG Marketing Corporation was established to conduct discussions with potential LNG buyers.

Israel has two large offshore gas fields – Tamar and Leviathan – off the coast of the city of Haifa.

The Tamara gas field’s reserves are estimated at 238 billion cubic metres and the potential of the Leviathan field is estimated at 453 billion cubic metres.

57 founding members, many of them prominent US allies, will sign into creation the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank on Monday, the first major global financial instrument independent from the Bretton Woods system.

Representatives of the countries will meet in Beijing on Monday to sign an agreement of the bank, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Thursday. All the five BRICS countries are also joining the new infrastructure investment bank.

The agreement on the $100 billion AIIB will then have to be ratified by the parliaments of the founding members, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang said at a daily press briefing in Beijing.

The AIIB is also the first major multilateral development bank in a generation that provides an avenue for China to strengthen its presence in the world’s fastest-growing region.